Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 20

Leadership and Responsibility

In a recent article,  Pia Lauritzen shared her insights on how leaders can create a sense of responsibility across their organisation. The key insight is that they can do so by smart use of questions – questions that shift the responsibility from them “Me” (self) to “You” (individual) to “Us”. I think she is on to something here. Taking all the responsibility on ourselves makes us feel like a hero or a martyr but doesnt necessarily help us achieve what we set out to. Making our employees respons...

Mindsets to Thrive in 2023

The agility and ability to switch between mindsets are what will set you apart from everyone around you and enable you to thrive in any given condition.

Always be Recruiting

One of our primary responsibilities as leaders is to assemble the best team possible to achieve the results that we want to achieve as a team. This means that we are constantly looking to figure out what kind of person can elevate the performance of the team as a whole. Once we understand this, we can then be always on the lookout for the talent that we need. You will be surprised how you can find the right talent in all the potentially wrong places or places where we are not looking. The key he...

The Law of the Loaf

One of the responsibilities of leaders is to organise our people and create contexts within which they operate. This context has a significant impact on the results that the teams can achieve. One way we put in place these contexts is through the culture we operate under (intentionally or unintentionally). And this decides how we interact with each other – as one entity moving toward the goal or as individuals working on each our own goals. It is fairly evident that we are much more effective wh...

How could SouthWest Airlines spend A Billion Dollars for IT Modernisation

One of the biggest news story this last Christmas season was the cascading effect of flights being cancelled by Southwest Airlines. According to their SEC filing, they had to cancel more than 16700 flights over the holiday period in December, costing them an estimated $725million-$825 million. The reason for this cascading effect was a perfect storm of outdated technology, a natural storm and their very own business model (point to point service instead of the hub and spoke model that almost all...

How Not to Slowdown Progress

Leo Szilard, in his book – The voice of the dolphins, and other stories has a short story titled The Mark Gable Foundation. In this short story, there is a conversation between two characters, one of who thinks that the pace of scientific change is too fast and is seeking ideas on how to slow it down. Here is their exchange: “I’m thinking of setting up a trust fund. I want to do something that will really contribute to the happiness of mankind; but it’s very difficult to know what to do with mon...

Streets, Roads, Stroads and Leadership Effectiveness

I was listening to a podcast episode on 99% Invisible hosted by the inimitable Roman Mars and they were talking about Stroads, which piqued my curiousity. So, today, we will explore this topic but from a leadership lens. Before we go ahead, I think it makes sense for us to define each one of these terms and what it means. Roads: A road is defined as a medium to move vehicles (cars, trucks, etc) from one point to another as quickly as possible. By this definition, all your highways and express wa...

The Happy Leader: Boost Your Happiness and Leadership Effectiveness

Our emotional states as leaders have a direct impact on the productivity of our teams. Emotions are contagious.

Pushing Beyond the Obvious

In a recent blog, advertising legend Dave Trott shares the story of the insight that led the Wright brothers succeed in recording the first human flight in history, while everyone else struggled and failed. The key insight was that they understood that it was not the air under the wings that powered the flight but it was the lack of air above the wings that sucked the aircraft upwards. This was going against all known wisdom of the day. So, there is a time and place for following conventions and...

Leaders, Futures and Foresight

As leaders, we are expected to have a vision of the future that we are leading our teams towards. To build this vision, we need to be able to think of the potential and probable futures, to decide and pick the one that we want to move towards. So, we need to learn to think about futures and learn the skill of foresight. Here is a conversation in which futurist Sohail Inayatullah (from MetaFutures) shares his perspectives with examples about thinking of transformational futures. Here are some les...